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The above statement should be pretty abrupt for many of us- after all in our imagination, woolly mammoths seems to be pretty alive, given the wild success of animated movies such as Ice Age. In real life of course, we are well aware that the mammoths went extinct sometime around or after the Ice Age. Today, however, the truth as to how mammoths came to be extinct has finally been revealed.

Mammoths were killed off due to climate warming events; as has been revealed by a brand new study. Science Magazine published around the start of this week, that a study that had been conducted in Australia, had found that large animals or as they were also known- megafauna; which included woolly mammoths, large bears as well as the giant sloth and the cave lions, had all gone extinct as their local climate steadily and slowly began to warm up.

During the Pleistocene age, which took place around an estimated 60,000 to 12000 years ago, there were abrupt climate spikes which were called interstadials, and it was these that resulted in an increase in temperatures to between 7 to 8 degrees F. in the space of just a decade and it was this that killed off many of the larger animals who could not unfortunately, survive in an overheated climate.

Researchers also believe that the warming climate also affected the prey of larger animals which meant that even if there were megafauna which had’nt been destroyed or affected by the warmer climate, the fact that it interfered with their food or made their habitats inhabitable resulted in either their starvation or their inability to live anywhere, protected from the intense climate.

Surprisingly though, even though it was known as the ‘Ice Age’, scientists have discovered that even though the warm climate was proving disastrous for the larger animals, the same could not be said of the increasing drop in the climate; in fact the animals seemed entirely unaffected by the colder climate.

It is also a scientific fact that it was only during the ten interstadial periods in history, that megafauna were ever adversely affected by the increasingly warm climate.